


I love you when you forget about me.

by Kaesteranya



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-04
Updated: 2011-05-04
Packaged: 2017-10-18 23:07:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaesteranya/pseuds/Kaesteranya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We disengage for our own good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I love you when you forget about me.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for May 3, 2008.

Once, long before she had ever become entangled in the web of the Group, back when she still knew how to dream, Julia had walked into a 99-cent store hoping to scrounge up some cheap goods for the house and walked out of it with a book, a slim, hodgepodge collection of myths from an Earth even more ancient than the one that everybody had been forced to abandon in the pre-space colony years. She could no longer remember all of the stories save one: something Greek, about the God of the Underworld and the Daughter of the Harvest. That tale, she recalled at the oddest moments, like on the very first day that she and Vicious ever met. In the shadows of the alley way, with his long coat and sword and that terrible bird on his shoulders and the bodies of the men he had summarily executed all around him, he had looked like a god of death stepping right out of the pages of a story to steal away her soul.

 

The next time she ever saw him was months later, when he came to pick up Spike, the wounded and scruffy dog of a man whom she had nursed back to health in her own bed.

 

He had stolen her from Spike, it seemed, precisely because he knew that he was not supposed to have her in the first place. There were no rules that Vicious understood beyond the ones that he created for himself, and friendship was something that he understood the least. She could have resisted him, or died trying to: it would have been the dignified and faithful thing to do. But she had no reason to faithful: she loved her life too much, and even the brightness of Spike’s soul wasn’t enough to make her turn her eyes from the lovely shadows that Vicious left in his wake.

 

It took her years to realize that in truth, neither of them could give her what she truly wanted. Neither of them were men that she could bring herself to love, but unless she disappeared, they weren’t ever going to stop trying to seek her out, drag her back down to wherever they were, be it out of love or out of a need to repossess what they believed was rightfully theirs.

 

The only way for any of them to be free was if she walked away and never looked back, and that was exactly what Julia did, even though she knew that they wouldn’t ever understand.


End file.
